"Apology Made to Whoever Pleases": Cultural Discipline and the Grounds of Interpretation

Abstract

After reviewing contemporary cultural and media scholarship that emphasizes the role of audiences in creating resistant readings of texts, this essay suggests that such audience-oriented theories should be re-supplemented with a concern for the ways in which texts, the grounds of interpretation, are constrained by cultural forces. Through a critical analysis of the controversy that ensued after Public Enemy's Professor Griff made universalizing claims about Jews, the essay investigates the economic, political, and ideological mechanisms that encouraged the band to withdraw the text (Griff's comments) and replace it with a text more consistent with the dominant cultural ideology of liberalism.